International and Historical Variation in the Age-Crime Curve

Our goals were to assess competing narratives within criminology about contextual variation in the age-crime curve (ACC) - most prominently, whether the ACC shows constancy or difference across societies and historically and whether the prevalence of adolescent lawbreaking is high, with a majority of teens committing crime, contributing to a steep peak followed by rapid, continuous descent among adjacent adult age groups. We analyzed historical and cross-national evidence from numerous sources that revealed significant variance in ACCs. Strongly at odds with invariance projections of an adolescent peak and rapid descent, the predominant age-crime patterns outside the United States were postadolescent peaks and spread-out age distributions. Teen prevalence was typically much lower than the projection that a majority of teens commit crime, whereas the prevalence of adult crime was often sizable and serious. We illustrate using understudied societies how a socio-cultural framework that draws on age-graded expectations, social control practices, age-structured crime opportunities and stressors, and resultant lifestyle differences across significant life stages (adolescence, young adulthood, midlife) can apply to understanding cross-national differences in the age-crime relationship. Methodological challenges and future areas of research are discussed.